Is the books world short-changing its bright young women?

Thursday 13 November 2008 03.00 EST
First published on Thursday 13 November 2008 03.00 EST

I tell this story tediously often, but as we're not married, it'll be new to you. When I was a university undergraduate, a female friend of mine got an invitation to tea from Professor Miri Rubin, the august early-modern historian (who's now a regular on Radio 4's In Our Time)."I asked you here," Professor Rubin explained, "to tell you that you are an intelligent woman. And throughout your life, people are going to be discomfited by that fact, and they'll pressure you to conceal it. But you have to be strong enough to walk into the room and say 'Hello, I am an intelligent and serious-minded young woman, and if that's not to your taste, that's your problem.' Understand?"

Nodding weakly and gulping her tea, my friend hurried down to the bar, where we all had a good laugh at the Professor's pronouncement. We hadn't a clue what she was talking about. Fifteen years of real life later, it makes perfect sense.

I was reminded of this episode last week, when I found out that my first book, Selling Your Father's Bones, had been shortlisted for this year's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The venerable award is given to the best work of literature by a UK or Commonwealth writer under the age of 35, so making the shortlist, alongside such talents as Aravind Adiga and Ross Raisin, was a genuinely breath-taking, eye-welling moment. But there was also a feeling of curiosity, perhaps confusion. The six of us on the list were all men. And the five authors who'd made the shortlist for this year's Guardian First Book Prize were also all men. John Dugdale, writing in Saturday's Guardian, called it a "strange pattern". So what's going on?

The first explanation is that there's a gender bias in the judging of literary awards. I think that's absolutely not the case ("But then you would say that…"). Women held the majority vote on the John Llewellyn Rhys panel and the chairpersonship of the Guardian prize – and it's surely a testament to how very seriously the judges took their responsibility that they didn't hastily re-shuffle the pack when they spotted the chromosome imbalance of their final selections.

Do, perhaps, publishing houses nominate their young male authors for awards more liberally than their young female ones? Again, no, as publishing houses by and large nominate every possible book for every conceivable prize they have even the slightest chance of winning. That scattergun knows no bias.

But does the literary industry as a whole – agents, editors, booksellers and critics – currently offer disproportionate encouragement to aspiring male writers to produce the kind of serious-minded, bookish work that gets on shortlists, compared to young female writers? Now, I suspect, we're on to something.

It's pretty clear that our culture as a whole is still more comfortable in the company of brainy, opinionated men than women – try thinking of the last major "authored documentary" series on TV in which a female intellectual wandered between the ruins and portraits, being pithy to camera, in place of Messrs Schama, Starkey, Ferguson, Hunt, Collings, Graham-Dixon, Meades, Hart-Davies or Cruikshank. Publishing may once have been a rebellious outpost against this hegemony, but my feeling is that as the industry has steadily lost confidence in the British public's capacity for seriousness, the pressure to move away from the heavy stuff has fallen more on female writers than male.

Giant new genres demand to be filled by predominantly female talent – misery memoirs, life-affirming "Richard and Judy" fiction, narcisso-journalism, plus the ever-resilient chick-lit - while the male-dominated opportunities to follow the market – blood-axes and bodices, copying Danny Wallace or being a former member of the SAS/Chelsea Headhunters/Cosa Nostra/all of the above – fill much less of the bookshop. It also feels to me that publishers are more willing to tell (and often kid) themselves that they've just uncovered the next Norman Mailer, a young man primed to burst into the literary top rank with a single almighty debut, than when faced with a fresh female face (upon whose features they will, of course, linger with unseemly interest).

Of course, many spectacular works by young women do reach the shelves unscathed, so there could be nothing in this. A former John Llewellyn Rhys judge told me that gender is "a complete non-issue – what newspapers write about because they struggle to write about books". But I'd like to be sure. Because like most writers, I'm rabidly competitive – and true competitors can't stand the thought of being handed an unfair advantage